Moksha:
Aldous Huxley' s Classic Writings on Psychedelics
and the Visionary Experience
Aldous Huxley' s Classic Writings on Psychedelics
and the Visionary Experience
304 pages, Park Street Press (April 1, 1999)
Interviewers: Do you see any relation between the creative process and the use of such drugs as lysergic acid [diethylamide]?
Huxley: I don't think there is any generalization one can make on this. Experience has shown that there's an enormous variation in the way people respond to lysergic acid. Some people probably could get direct aesthetic inspiration for painting or poetry out of it. Others I don't think could. For most people it's an extremely significant experience, and I suppose in an indirect way it could help the creative process. But I don't think one can sit down and say, "I want to write a magnificent poem, and so I'm going to take lysergic acid [diethylamide]." I don't think it's by any means certain that you would get the result you wanted -- you might get almost any result.
Interviewers: Here this afternoon, as in your book, The Doors of Perception, you've been talking chiefly about the visual experience under the drug, and about painting. Is there any similar gain in psychological insight?
Huxley: Yes, I think there is. While one is under the drug one has penetrating insights into the people around one, and also into one's own life. Many people get tremendous recalls of buried material. A process which may take six years of psychoanalysis happens in an hour -- and considerably cheaper! And the experience can be very liberating and widening in other ways. It shows that the world one habitually lives in is merely a creation of this conventional, closely conditioned being which one is, and that there are quite other kinds of worlds outside. It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.
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